The rapid growth in the use of the Internet and the increasing interest in portable computing devices have triggered the desire for high-speed wireless data services. One of the more promising candidates for achieving high data rate transmission in a mobile environment is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which divides the wide signal bandwidth into many narrow-band subchannels, which are transmitted in parallel. Each subchannel is typically chosen narrow enough to eliminate the effects of delay spread. Coded OFDM (COFDM) systems, which combine both OFDM and channel coding techniques, are able to improve the performance further by taking advantage of frequency diversity of the channel.
Though both differential and coherent demodulation can be applied in a COFDM system, the latter leads to a performance gain of 3 to 4 dB in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with accurate channel estimation. Channel estimation techniques realized by a frequency-domain filter using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), followed by time-domain filters for a COFDM system with Reed-Solomon (RS) coding have been proposed. These channel estimation techniques, while good, did not provide the near optimal channel estimation required for data-decoding with improved channel tracking capability for reliable link performance even under high user mobility and/or high RF carrier frequency.